The New School for Social Research (NSSR), an institution long known for upholding and furthering values of critical education, anti-fascism, and democracy, is under threat from its own leadership. At a time when these very values are imperiled the world over, it is of vital importance that we stop New School President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler, and Chief Operating Officer Francisco Pineda in their efforts to dismantle the NSSR. Their reckless actions, cloaked by claims of “financial necessity,” are part of an ideological campaign designed to eliminate spaces of critical inquiry and an attack on the school’s founding mission, and on critical thought and scholarship more broadly.
This letter from current students, faculty, and staff members is written with great urgency. It is widely known that the institution faces financial shortfalls. Due to heightened under-enrollment during the second Trump administration, shady real estate deals, and administrative mismanagement, the deficit this year rose to $48 million. Financial adjustments are clearly necessary. Nobody here is against change or transformation. If anything, the NSSR is the place where transformation is not only theorized but also lived.
However, financial necessity is not the motivation for The New School leadership’s plan of targeted destruction. Last month, the university administration announced a pause to PhD admissions for the whole of the NSSR, except for the Clinical Psychology program. In early December, leadership sent out letters to 40 percent of all faculty members inviting them to take buyouts, euphemistically calling them “voluntary separation” agreements. Staff across the entire university received letters of their own. This move follows recently announced unilateral cuts to salary and retirement contributions for full-time faculty and staff along with the shuttering of dozens of programs such as Anthropology, Sociology, and History.
These letters affect almost the entire full-time NSSR faculty, as well as faculty from Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts and the former Schools of Public Engagement. These are the core sites of critical inquiry at The New School, and they are being targeted. At the most stressful time of the semester, faculty have been given less than a fortnight to make a life-changing decision: to take these buyouts or risk being fired in the near future. Leadership is reported to want anywhere between 15 and 50 percent of full-time faculty gone, both tenured and untenured.
These reckless measures cut to the bone and affect all of us: 40 percent of full-time faculty facing termination means massive course cancellations, larger class sizes, and degraded education for students across all divisions. When NSSR PhD programs are eliminated, master’s students lose their pathway to PhDs and go elsewhere. That is revenue lost across the entire institution. Current students in “indefinitely discontinued” programs will complete degrees with disappearing faculty, no new courses, and shrinking departments. This is educational malpractice. It destroys the reputation of the institution, making it unlikely to attract scholars and students alike.
It is claimed by the administration that these “structural adjustments” are financially necessary; this is a lie. Faculty have submitted alternative measures, backed by economists, that are cost-saving, viable, and minimally disruptive to education. These proposals have been ignored. Members of the Board of Trustees and outside donors offered over $4 million to keep the PhD programs running. President Towers rejected the offer, stating that this would not solve the financial problems but “kick the can down the road.” This shocking decision reveals that money is not the issue. The intentions of President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler, and COO Francisco Pineda lie elsewhere. This is a politically and ideologically driven effort to gut the NSSR as a site of critical inquiry, for which claims to financial necessity act as a cover.
The president and provost, in response to community outrage, have emphasized their commitment to “doctoral education.” Their interest, though, lies in remaking PhDs at The New School to align with their for-profit vision, and with a focus on their own fields of Music and Design. To remake the storied university in their own image, the reckless leaders will jettison faculty who have hitherto taught generations of doctoral students from the world over. Valuing this novelty and profit over disciplinary study denigrates PhD education in the Humanities and Social Sciences and decimates the school’s legacy of critical, anti-fascistic, and democratic thought.
Meanwhile, upper administrators take home high six-figure salaries, and administrative bloat goes unaddressed. Years of misguided spending by university leadership has created the budgetary shortfall now being used to justify these measures. This includes millions paid to Huron Consulting and other outside consultants to advise on how to enact such austerity policies, countless dollars given to union-busting lawyers such as Akerman LLP, and more still spent fighting part-time faculty and the student union in arbitration. The decision at the end of 2024 to purchase a Chelsea apartment worth over $5.1 million for the president’s use likely did little to ameliorate the university’s fiscal crisis.
The values of NSSR are of crucial importance in this political moment, in which higher education is struggling to survive tout court. The New School administration is taking a DOGE-style approach—antidemocratic, fast, furious, and reckless, accelerating the demise of critical thought from within. Towers, Kessler, and Pineda have violated every principle of shared faculty governance as it was set down in The New School’s 1918 founding document. The school was envisioned as a space to confront the problems of our times, which would “emancipate learning from the narrow trammels” set down by administrators, where there should be neither deans nor presidents and where “overhead expenses” should be cut to the minimum.
The NSSR is not a negligible piece of a large university. It is the foundation of the institution, from which The New School gets its name. When the university claims to be “100 years New” it is dating its origin to 1919—to the founding of the NSSR, a school committed, in the words of its first president, to “the continuing education of the educated.” It is in the NSSR, too, that the University in Exile was founded in 1933 as a haven for research in Economics and Social Sciences by intellectuals, largely Jewish, fleeing genocide, fascism, and persecution in Europe. It is a place that built, cemented, and still upholds a legacy of social justice and anti-fascist scholarship. This legacy is what is at stake today.
We ask you to join us in rejecting the administration’s ideologically driven attack on critical education, and their reckless realization of this agenda at The New School for Social Research.
Please sign this letter to let Towers, Kessler, Pineda, and the Board of Trustees know that this path of destruction cannot continue.
